The annual Travel & Leisure hotel issue is out now, with lots of info on hotel trends and where we’re headed. As usual, the have a top-10 list of hotels for each region, plus some picks for the most notable new hotel openings of the year. I always think these readers’ lists are pretty screwy since only so many people are willing to wade through that long survey—mostly people with plenty of time on their hands instead of a business to run. Plus it’s easy to ballot stuff. But still, since we have reviews of 10 out of the 10, I’m not going to quibble about who should and shouldn’t be on here. These are their top 10 for Central and South America.

Four Seasons Resort Carmelo – Uruguay
Palacio Duhau Park Hyatt – Argentina (pictured above)
Explora Patagonia – Chile
Alvear Palace Hotel – Argentina
Victoria House – Belize
Hotel Monasterio – Peru
Four Seasons Buenos Aires – Argentina
Hotel Oro Verde Guayaquil – Ecuador
Blancaneaux Lodge – Belize
Turtle Inn – Belize

I have a feeling this list will look very different two years from now, with many superior upstart resorts replacing some of the old guard coasting on name recognition. We shall see…

I got interviewed last week for this article that just came out in Walletpop.com: Hotel fakeout photos can lure you and your money.

In Luxury Latin America, we only use hotel-supplied photos as a last resort, much to the chagrin of public relations people who want the same dreamy photos to be published everywhere that the hotel appears. It’s not that I don’t like pretty professional hotel photos, I just don’t trust them. Over and over again, what I see when I arrive at the hotel bears little relation to what I see on the staged and manipulated photos a hotel puts in its brochures and on its website.

The photo at the top is one of the perfectly nice guest rooms at Hacienda Tres Rios in the Riviera Maya. Go on their website though—or the website of just about any other resort in the region—and you’ll see sprawling rooms that look like they’re 1,500 square feet, thanks to the way the shots have been manipulated.

As the article notes, most of us are willing to put up with a bit of fantasy here and there. We know the models lounging by the pool are not the typical guests. We know it’s not sunny and beautiful every day. But the photographers can never seem to leave it at that. Here are typical deceptions you see most often:

1) Wide angle lenses and shooting from down low make guest rooms look far larger than they are.

2) Wide angle lenses, shooting angle, and clever cropping make swimming pools look much larger than they are.

3) Old, out-of-date photos are kept up for years, ignoring the construction next door, the eroded beach, or the peeling paint job you’ll see upon arrival.

4) Photos show an empty pool, when it reality it’s jam-packed every day and you’ll have trouble finding a lounge chair.

5) Room shots show a stunning view outside, when in fact 95% of the rooms don’t have a view anything like that.

Although top luxury hotels don’t need to be as deceptive as others, they often can’t resist the temptation either. So most of our hotel photos are shot by the writer actually doing the review. These shots may not pop off the screen as much as the staged ones, but they’ll show you what the reviewer saw, not what someone conjured up with Photoshop.

If you suspect the photos of a place you’re considering have been overly manipulated, do a Google Images search and a Flickr search with the hotel’s name. Often that will pull up dozens of photos from past guests and maybe a video or two. TripAdvisor reviews often have user photos and Oyster.com (also quoted in the article linked here) attacks the fake-out photos with glee.

Read the full article on WalletPop.com.

There’s apparently something in the water in Central America that inspires their tourism boards to latch onto silly and meaningless slogans like a birdwatcher reaching for binoculars. The latest one to earn guffaws and ridicule is Panama’s, which is a year old but just got pilloried by this Jaunted post: Panama Picks A Tourism Slogan Reminiscent Of Childhood Trauma, STDs.

What is this inspired tourism slogan? “Panama – It Will Never Leave You.”

Could it be any worse? Panama watchers are having a heyday with this one, wondering whether it refers to malaria, dengue fever, stalkers, or something picked up from a prostitute. That’s one way to get honest feedback I guess. Just put out your new slogan and see how many people make fun of it on blogs and twitter. (If nobody does, it probably means your slogan is just boring, since few of these things seem to actually move the needle in terms of visitors anyway. But better to be boring than a laughing stock.)

Back in 2006, Guatemala launched the focus-group-inspired slogan “Soul of the Earth” and they’ve stuck with it ever since. WTF?! I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean, much less how it applies to Guatemala and not any of its neighbors. Will there be shamans and chanting involved? Or spelunking? Will I feel the ground vibrate during the summer solstice?

Honduras appears to have used three slogans in as many years. I’ve got a hat a local tourism person gave me with the Spanish version of their slogan “One small country, three big worlds.” I put this into an article I wrote for another publication after I returned from there because I thought it nicely summed up the answer to the inevitable question, “Why go there?” You go because you’ve got a great Maya ruins site, nature preserves, and the coral-fringed islands. So the slogan actually means something.

Alas, I then got a wrist slapping from a PR and advertising agency person who had worked with me setting up part of my research there. Apparently her agency had spent tons of money on focus groups and reports to come up with a brand new slogan: “The Central America you know — the country you’ll love.”

Again, are you kidding me? You could slap that same tag line onto Costa Rica, Guatemala, or Panama and nobody would know the difference. That slogan is still up on the agency-built website, but there was yet another one in between those two for a brief time: “It’s All Here In Honduras.” Apparently it wasn’t all there after all. But now Honduras really is looking like “the Central America you know,” coup d’etats and all.

El Salvador and Nicaragua both go for a one-word slogan. Nicaragua’s is simply, “Unique.” El Salvador went for “Impressive!” Well, the waves are impressively grarly in El Salvador I guess and Nicaragua is unique in being the poorest mainland country in the Americas, but neither slogan does much to sell the destination or paint a picture of why anyone should visit. How about just saying, “We’re generic”? Or “You’ll probably have a good time if you come here on vacation.” Pretty much the same thing.

Belize has “Mother Nature’s best-kept secret.” Maybe Mother Nature’s best-kept secret is that the soul of the Earth is actually in Guatemala. And Belize isn’t exactly a secret anymore. But really, at least that one at least doesn’t leave you scratching your head.

So are there any Central American destination slogans that really work? Yes one, and it’s no coincidence that it’s from the country that gets the most tourists by far.

“Costa Rica: no artificial ingredients.”

Nicely played Ticos.

Casa Palopo, Guatemala (Photo Al Argueta)

Marketing guru and all-around smart guy Seth Godin has a great concise post on his blog about “luxury” vs. “premium.”

Luxury goods are needlessly expensive. By needlessly, I mean that the price is not related to performance. The price is related to scarcity, brand and storytelling.

Premium goods, on the other hand, are expensive variants of commodity goods. Pay more, get more.

We decided to call our site “Luxury Latin America” because it conveys the right feeling and it’s easy to understand in different cultures and contexts. Premium just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Sounds like something from a gas station.

But we talk a lot more about value in our honest hotel and tour reviews because we refuse to believe that luxury implies “overpriced.” In some cases yes, and we’ll say so, but in many other cases the guests would say the experience was worth every penny. Plus a hotel may be a commodity at the business chain level and many tours of Costa Rica or Patagonia could be considered commodities since they are so similar, this is certainly not the case at the true 5-star level.

So that’s why we leave out many hotels that Travel + Leisure would go all ga-ga over because we don’t have to care how it looks in a fold-out photo spread. We care more about how you’ll be treated by the staff and whether the amenities will exceed your expectations. Part of the reason we focus on Latin America is because overall, the hotels and tours are a great value, even at the very top end. When it is clear to us that guests feel like they are being ripped off, we’ll either leave that option out or—when it’s a prominent hotel that needs to be in here—we’ll note that the rates don’t necessarily reflect what you get for your money.

Some of the Brazil luxury hotel reviews we just posted fit into the latter case. Many would say the Sanctuary Lodge at Machu Picchu does as well. Overall though, in each feature story or review we try to answer the question, “Will you get your money’s worth by booking with this company?” We’re not about the travel equivalent of a $50,000 handbag. We’re the travel equivalent of the custom-made suit.

According to The Telegraph newspaper, the swine flu attitude in Cancun seems to be ignore it and it will go away.

Have you ever wanted to fly in a private jet, but find that it’s a little out of your league? You can stay in this bizarre Costa Rican hotel suite instead, one that is half bungalow, half airplane.

A HotelChatter writer found little that was cool about Five Cool Rooms in Buenos Aires. Read the review to see the problem we have with most hip boutique hotels in Buenos Aires: small rooms, bad service, and rates that are way out of line for what you get. (The writer wanted to stay at Home, which we can vouch has an excellent restaurant.)

We’ve been hearing about this swanky Uxua Casa Hotel in the Bahia region of Brazil since before Luxury Latin America went live two years ago, but apparently it is open for real now. It’s on our list to get to at some point as our Brazil section will start up next week.